Weird Fiction

Weird-Fiction is an international myth conspiracy that siphons and solicits ficto-quizzical yields from and within the design of images, sounds, datums, performances and texts. Populated? Perhaps. Call it technocultural kudzu, a fuzzy set, an invasive species loosed in the information ecosystem. Derelict theory objects, material and linguistic, are field tested, bred for resilience and set adrift in the network cosmos, if frequently marooned in the vicinity of Portland, Earth.

ARTIST STATEMENT

“Cyberspace is real,” claims Barack Obama in 2009, for whom, like a textbook synesthete—metaphors are concrete. Google, Facebook, and other Data centrists in the silicon forest subscribe to this rhetoric and are quite comfortably tasking their terabytes to the terra nova of the Oregon high desert. Whereas the desert of the real will take a tax hike, the Northwest passage of globally networked data escapes taxation by qualifying as a rural enterprise zone.

From the vantage of the some unknowable past, the attention economy of the future was always an exponentially exasperating catastrophe, a shock policy policing the politics of [data] bodies. Rewinding and re-watching our personal surveillance tapes requires us to stop a lifetime at the halfway point, and re-view. In “real” time, self-surveillance requires both an active and a passive half-life. Optimistically, one’s mediated life would take a while to flash before the eyes, and so it would be wise to begin the review early. Such “half-life” theories, amplified under the regime of quantified selfing and exaggerated by libertarian transhumanist platforms, lead to weird obsessions.